Imagery in My Antonia

Let’s start with some personal news. Those of you who don’t follow me on Twitter or Facebook may have been wondering where I’ve been the past few weeks. Guess what, I’ve moved to London for work. 

Now let’s talk about My Antonia. 

My Antonia has a frame story in which “the author” and a guy named Jim Burden want to write a book about Antonia (stress on the first syllable). Jim Burden jots down some notes, which turn into a memoir, and that is the book we read. Jim Burden at the age of 10 moved to Nebraska to live with his grandparents, after his parents’ deaths, and there he met Antonia and her family from Bohemia. The title is slightly misleading—it is about her, but it’s also about Jim Burden’s life and about other people in Nebraska, especially in Black Hawk.

Willa Cather’s novel is a novel about people. As I assume people generally write about characters, I’ll write about something else. 

“There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.” (B.1, ch.1) 

I like that. 

“Perhaps the glide of long railway travel was still with me, for more than anything else I felt motion in the landscape; in the fresh, easy-blowing morning wind, and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy grass were a sort of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping, galloping …” (B.1, ch.2) 

Is that not good? 

“All about me giant grasshoppers, twice as big as any I had ever seen, were doing acrobatic feats among the dried vines.” (ibid.) 

See how Willa Cather writes about the seasons: 

“There was only—spring itself; the throb of it, the light restlessness, the vital essence of it everywhere; in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in the warm, high wind—rising suddenly, sinking suddenly, impulsive and playful like a big puppy that pawed you and then lay down to be petted.” (B.1, ch.17) 

That’s spring, here’s winter: 

“Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen. […] in Black Hawk the scene of human life was spread out shrunken and pinched, frozen down to the bare stalk.” (B.2, ch.7) 

I also love the way she describes the weather. 

“The long fingers of the sun touched their foreheads.” (B.2, ch.9) 

This is a particularly striking image of the sun: 

“Presently we saw a curious thing: There were no clouds, the sun was going down in a limpid, gold-washed sky. Just as the lower edge of the red disc rested on the high fields against the horizon, a great black figure suddenly appeared on the face of the sun. We sprang to our feet, straining our eyes toward it. In a moment we realized what it was. On some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the field. The sun was sinking just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the circle of the disc; the handles, the tongue, the share—black against the molten red. There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun.” (ibid.) 

The sun and the moon:

“As we walked homeward across the fields, the sun dropped and lay like a great golden globe in the low west. While it hung there, the moon rose in the east, as big as a cartwheel, pale silver and streaked with rose color, thin as a bubble or a ghost-moon.” (B.4, ch.4) 

The evening star: 

“On the edge of the prairie, where the sun had gone down, the sky was turquoise blue, like a lake, with gold light throbbing in it. Higher up, in the utter clarity of the western slope, the evening star hung like a lamp suspended by silver chains—like the lamp engraved upon the title-page of old Latin texts, which is always appearing in new heavens, and waking new desires in men.” (B.3, ch.2) 

The writing is so good. 

“Misfortune seemed to settle like an evil bird on the roof of the log house, and to flap its wings there, warning human beings away.” (B.1, ch.8) 

The book is full of fascinating metaphors and similes. 

“Now there was a place where the girls could wear their new dresses, and where one could laugh aloud without being reproved by the ensuing silence. That silence seemed to ooze out of the ground, to hang under the foliage of the black maple trees with the bats and shadows.” (B.2, ch.8) 

Sound: 

“Now it was broken by light-hearted sounds. First the deep purring of Mr. Vanni’s harp came in silvery ripples through the blackness of the dusty-smelling night…” (ibid.) 

Silence “[oozes] out of the ground” and sound comes “in silvery ripples”. 

The way Willa Cather describes people is also interesting. For example, this is Mr Shimerda, Antonia’s father: 

“He took the bag from his belt and showed us three rabbits he had shot, looked at Ántonia with a wintry flicker of a smile and began to tell her something.” (B.1, ch.6) 

This is Pavel, one of the two Russians (note the crazy story of the wolves): 

“He must once have been a very strong man, but now his great frame, with big, knotty joints, had a wasted look, and the skin was drawn tight over his high cheek-bones.” (B.1, ch.5) 

This is the black prodigy pianist: 

“When he was sitting, or standing still, he swayed back and forth incessantly, like a rocking toy. At the piano, he swayed in time to the music, and when he was not playing, his body kept up this motion, like an empty mill grinding on.” (B.2, ch.7) 

Gross, but this is also an interesting comparison: 

“The dead man was frozen through, “just as stiff as a dressed turkey you hang out to freeze,”…” (B.1, ch.9) 

My Antonia is a very good book. 

Reading women’s short stories: Kate Chopin and Willa Cather

As the libraries are closed, I don’t buy books, and didn’t borrow enough before the lockdown, reading becomes a bit of an issue. I still want to read more works by women this year, so now the option seems to be reading short stories in the Norton Anthology of American Literature (my copy is the shorter edition). 
(This probably shows how extreme my view is regarding print books vs e-books—I’d rather hold the Norton Anthology than read an e-book from Gutenberg on the laptop or on the phone). 
Some brief thoughts: 
- Kate Chopin:  
I read at least one of her short stories at UiO, and read The Awakening in 2017—badly. There is nothing interesting I can say about The Awakening, except that I remember thinking the prose was good and she didn’t pass judgment. 
The 3 stories in the anthology are “At the ‘Cadian Ball” (1892), its sequel “The Storm” (1898), and “Désirée’s Baby” (1895). They’re all good, interesting. “The Storm”, which wasn’t published in her lifetime, is particularly interesting, because it deals with sexuality and depicts a passionate affair between 2 ex-lovers, who are now both married—it is erotic, and there is no judgment. 
Look at this sentence: 

“Alcée clasped her shoulders and looked into her face. The contact of her warm, palpitating body when he had unthinkingly drawn her into his arms, had aroused all the old-time infatuation and desire for her flesh.” 

And this sentence about Calixta: 

“As she glanced up at him the fear in her liquid blue eyes had given place to a drowsy gleam that unconsciously betrayed a sensuous desire.” 

If these 2 sentences don’t make you want to check out the story, I don’t know what will. 
“The Storm” can stand on its own, but it doesn’t hurt to read “At the ‘Cadian Ball” first to get to know the background and the characters, as well as the people Alcée and Calixta marry (Clarisse and Bobinôt respectively). 
“Désirée’s Baby” is about racism and miscegenation. I’m going to “spoil” the plot by saying that it’s about a racist man who kicks his wife (Désirée) out because their baby is part black, which suggests that Désirée, who is of unknown origins, is mixed race, but it’s revealed in the end that the racist man himself is part black. 
I don’t think that’s a spoiler, because the twist isn’t much of a twist—the key is how it’s done, how the story unfolds. 
Overall: good stuff. I should read more from Kate Chopin. 

- Willa Cather: 
I’ve not read anything by Willa Cather.  
Whilst Kate Chopin’s stories are quite short, the selected stories by Willa Cather in the Anthology are much longer. “Neighbour Rosicky” (1930) is a long short story, comprising of 6 parts, about Anton Rosicky, an old Czech farmer who resides in Nebraska with his wife and 6 children. 
She writes shorter, simpler sentences than I usually read. For instance:  

“But as the years passed, all alike, he began to get a little restless.  When spring came round, he would begin to feel fretted, and he got to drinking.  He was likely to drink too much of a Saturday night.  On Sunday he was languid and heavy, getting over his spree.  On Monday he plunged into work again.  So he never had time to figure out what ailed him, though he knew something did. When the grass turned green in Park Place, and the lilac hedge at the back of Trinity churchyard put out its blossoms, he was tormented by a longing to run away.  That was why he drank too much; to get a temporary illusion of freedom and wide horizons.” (P.3)

I like the flow and rhythm of her sentences. Willa Cather captures well the voices of her characters, but I can also hear the narrator’s voice. It’s hard to explain, but most of the time whilst reading a book, I see the words on the page and they stay on the page, so to speak, but once in a while, the narrator has such a strong voice that I can hear their voice speaking in my ears whilst I’m reading. An example is The Catcher in the Rye, but that’s an obvious one because Holden Caulfield uses colloquial language and slang, but I get the same effect with “Neighbour Rosicky”—I can hear the voice talking, like narration in a film.    
Take a look at this passage: 

“Rosicky, the old Rosicky, could remember as if it were yesterday the day when the young Rosicky found out what was the matter with him. It was on a Fourth of July afternoon, and he was sitting in Park Place in the sun. The lower part of New York was empty. Wall Street, Liberty Street, Broadway, all empty. So much stone and asphalt with nothing going on, so many empty windows. The emptiness was intense, like the stillness in a great factory when the machinery stops and the belts and bands cease running. It was too great a change, it took all the strength out of one. Those blank buildings, without the stream of life pouring through them, were like empty jails. It struck young Rosicky that this was the trouble with big cities; they built you in from the earth itself, cemented you away from any contact with the ground. You lived in an unnatural world, like the fish in an aquarium, who were probably much more comfortable than they ever were in the sea.” (ibid.) 

Does that not sound like the narration in Golden Hollywood films? That’s a good passage, though. 
“Neighbour Rosicky” has warmth—there’s some element of idealism, but it has warmth, and the characters appear very real.  
“The Sculptor’s Funeral” (1905) is a shorter story. The sculptor in the title is Marvey Merrick, who returns to his hometown in Kansas when he dies—the story mostly focuses on the perspective and impressions of his pupil Steavens, as he watches the Merrick family and other town people at the funeral. 
Compared to “Neighbour Rosicky”, the story is much shorter, and the prose is different—I don’t hear the narrating voice. 
The writing is good, like this one about the mother’s insincere display of grief: 

“… wailed the elder woman between her sobs. This time Steavens looked fearfully, almost beseechingly, into her face, red and swollen under its masses of strong, black, shiny hair. He flushed, dropped his eyes, and then, almost incredulously, looked again. There was a kind of power about her face—a kind of brutal handsomeness, even; but it was scarred and furrowed by violence, and so colored and coarsened by fiercer passions that grief seemed never to have laid a gentle finger there. The long nose was distended and knobbed at the end, and there were deep lines on either side of it; her heavy, black brows almost met across her forehead, her teeth were large and square, and set far apart—teeth that could tear. She filled the room; the men were obliterated, seemed tossed about like twigs in an angry water, and even Steavens felt himself being drawn into the whirlpool.” 

It is overall a good story, with some fine moments such as when Steavens and the lawyer, Jim Laird, overhear the mother cruelly abusing a servant for a small mistake (soon after her performance as a grieving mother), or when Steavens hear the town people speaking disrespectfully of Merrick. However, I think Laird’s passionate speech at the end feels a bit forced and clumsy, almost like a device to express the author’s own rage at the narrow-mindedness and bitterness of the town people.  
The stories do make me want to read more Willa Cather though. 

After this, I’m not quite sure what to read next. These days my concentration is rubbish.